


The End of the War

by Valmouth



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Avatar the Last Airbender, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-30
Updated: 2011-09-01
Packaged: 2017-10-23 06:12:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/247092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Valmouth/pseuds/Valmouth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the end, it doesn’t seem to matter. The end of the war comes and goes without him, and Jet is not dead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I acknowledge that I own no rights to the characters, events, or creative universe used herein and taken from the TV show 'Avatar: The Last Airbender'. I mean no offence by posting this and certainly make no money from it.

The end of the war passes him by. Bitter irony that he is locked in a cell, starving and half-broken, his dream of making a glorious sacrifice for the Earth Kingdom lying in tatters around his bare toes with only a scar to show for it.

The scar cuts in a thick line across the concave softness of his stomach, jagged and white against the fading tan of his skin.

He hates the Dai Li, he hates the Fire Nation and he hates the weakness- the treachery- of his own mind. But he is dependent upon all three in his prison cell in Ba Sing Se. Of the three, his mind is probably the harshest jailor.

He rages at the first appearance of Fire Nation guards, and his redoubled efforts to escape result in a severe beating that cracks his ribs- again- and knocks out two teeth.

During the two day interrogation he goes through, an official comes to see him. Since he is tied to a chair, with the chair overturned, and since his eyes are mostly swelling shut, all Jet can see are the toes of very thick, very heavy boots. When he tilts his head, he sees the black and red uniform and a glint of cold, dark eyes.

Jet clenches his teeth shut on the names of his fellow conspirators. He keeps firm hold of his sanity and settles for silence and glaring.

The official shouts, kicks him a few times, shouts some more, and then leaves. Then the guards come back.

When the guards are done, there’s nothing much that Jet can do to still his tongue, his racing heart, or his panic. In a desperate bid to distract them and himself, he talks about his previous experience of imprisonment under the Dai Li. They’re not really interested until he starts talking about Li.

Not that they tell him then what he finds out later- he was right. Not Li, but Zuko. Prince Zuko, disguised son and heir to the bastard Fire Lord himself.

Jet finds out from a fellow prisoner who shares his cell for a few days. He knows the Fire Nation soldiers react to the words ‘firebender’, ‘disguise’ and ‘burn scar over left eye’, so he’s basically asking anyone and everyone that he can.

He has talked himself into some fanciful notion of Li as some kind of firebender resistance operative. Like maybe even firebenders don’t think this war is right, maybe even firebenders don’t like their insane, sadistic Fire Lord, and maybe Li was on the run from his own kind. Jet still doesn’t trust a firebender, but he thinks it would explain Li’s conflict. Plus that damn suspicion that always burned in those golden eyes.

Jet has almost talked himself into some weird belief that Li was just like him when his temporary cell mate arrives. He asks idly, not really expecting an answer, and the guy looks at him like he’s just sworn an allegiance to the Fire Nation.

Jet ends up slammed against the wall, a hand at his throat, and through the roaring in his ears, he hears the words ‘Zuko’, ‘Prince’, ‘Fire Nation’, ‘friends’ and ‘betrayed us’.

He chokes and can’t breathe, so he doesn’t get a chance to say that he has never and will never be any kind of friend to a Fire Nation citizen, firebender or not, royalty or not. He blacks out and when he comes to, he finds that he’s acquired a reputation for fraternizing with the enemy.

He loses his sanity for a few days after that and never quite remembers what went on. There are flashes- mostly conversation with people who couldn’t possibly have been there. People like Aang and Katara and Smellerbee and Longshot. People like Long Feng. People like Li.

Zuko. He tests it on his tongue and shouts it as he kicks the walls and door and then falls over and drums his fists on the ground.

He had the Fire Nation Prince in his grasp and he let him slip through. This same Prince who helped his sister kill Aang and capture Ba Sing Se. This same Prince who is responsible for the Fire Nation soldiers tramping through the streets of the capital of the Earth Kingdom. The Prince who is the son of the man who caused the deaths of Jet’s parents.

He heals, though. There is nothing else to do in prison but either go mad or heal. And Jet’s mind has already proved to do nothing that he expects. He doesn’t get let out of his prison, and because of his reputation he doesn’t get nominated for any escape plans going the rounds.

When the war ends, he hears the distance-dull thumps and explosions but he doesn’t get to participate. The guards are clearly busy so he doesn’t get fed for a few days either. Or maybe it was just one day. He’s lost track now. He hasn’t seen the sun since he last saw the Avatar and his friends, and his mind keeps playing tricks on him.

In the end, it takes another six months for some harassed official to get around to his imprisonment record. There are actual thieves and murderers and lunatics in the prison, so prisoners aren’t high on the new post-war agenda. Anyway, all the political prisoners who matter are known to each other and their friends on the outside, so they get freed pretty quickly. Jet has no one to vouch for him. He’s got a reputation for befriending firebenders and Fire Nation Princes, so the Earth Kingdom guards sort of ignore him for the most part.

Jet doesn’t get to hear much about the outside world so he presumes that Aang has won and the Fire Lord has fallen, and somewhere in there his vengeance slavers at the thought that Li too would be dead or captured. Hopefully tortured. Beaten. Trapped.

Six months later he is allowed to leave. He tries to track down Smellerbee and Longshot but they were arrested too when the Dai Li found them in the tunnels under Lake Laogi. They’re too unimportant for people to know where they are.

He hangs around and stretches his legs for a week. Then he hears the tales- the Masters of three elements who took back the city by themselves, the Avatar’s victory, the Fire Lord’s defeat, the Dai Li’s duplicity. He hears about Zuko.

Sorry, Fire Lord Zuko. Killed his sister to take the throne.

Cruel, but since Zuko is apparently on the side of the Earth Kingdom, no one seems to care. Jet walks off the tension and feels his fingers itch for his hook swords.

There are no Fire Nation soldiers allowed into Ba Sing Se but their signs are everywhere. Jet finds helmets in gutters, tanks piled up in a square, burn marks on the walls. There are hastily hidden Fire Nation wares still available on the black market, because honestly, hungry people do not care where food comes from so long as they can eat.

Jet stands on his principles and the last reserves of his strength for five days before weakness and starvation drive him to the nearest charity centre.

It’s a lesson in humility. He’s the only whole, able-bodied boy of his age there. It’s mostly full of old people, children and maimed survivors.

A girl comes in with a child in her arms, dusty and obviously tired. The child has a bandage wrapped around her head but she seems cheerful enough. Looking around with big dark eyes she spots Jet, who hadn’t meant to stare except that the girl is pretty and serene and looks like she’s capable of carrying all the world’s cares on her shoulders. Jet hasn’t seen too many girls like her before, and he’s spent eleven months seeing hardly anyone at all.

The girl’s attention is brought to him by a little hand tugging insistently at her sleeve.

“What is it?” she says, and actually looks. Not like half the exhausted mothers around her.

The child points at Jet and Jet slouches, grimacing, whipping his head away and trying not to be seen.

It doesn’t exactly work. The child apparently has a head wound that she will not let the healer touch it, and after fifteen minutes of hearing sobs and screams and wailing, Jet snaps. He used to be good with kids and he used to be charming, and so he goes over and tries to do both so the kid will just stop screaming.

His head in pounding; there are little white spots on the edges of his vision and that’s usually a sign that his sanity is slipping. Since he fears that as much as he hates it, he does his best to get some peace and quiet. The fact that he succeeds feels slightly unfamiliar after all this time.

The girl doesn’t touch him but she lifts a hand gently, slowly, like she’s used to soothing people who are skittish.

“Thank you,” she says, and, “What’s your name?”

Nobody’s wanted to know his name in so long that it feels strange to say it. “Jet.”

“I’m Song,” she says, and nods once.

The child is exhausted with crying and pain and the journey, so Jet watches as she is gathered up into plump, dependable arms.

Old habits die hard and Jet can be charming, but he can also observe- the way a refugee stares, moves, like a warrior- so he doesn’t find it hard to pick up the signs that the girl is just as tired as her little charge. So he says, “Let me help,” and takes over the burden.

A pair of steady, smiling, completely sane brown eyes looks up at him and the girl dips her head gently in agreement.

The child is almost painfully light and Jet doesn’t know if it’s because his strength is coming back or if the poor thing’s just too skinny, but he finds himself more captivated by the figure walking beside him. The old self-confidence is easy to fake, just for a few minutes, and he leaves them at a vegetable stall.

Except that he doesn’t leave. He lingers, watching the curve of a pale neck.

Song looks up at him as if she’s seen it all before, the best and worst in people, and she says, “Thank you,” again, as if this small act of kindness has meant so much.

Jet thinks for a minute that she might be a bit of a flirt, might be trying her luck with a down-and-out ex-soldier, but there is nothing at all flirty about the friendly way she asks him if he wants to eat with them.

They go to a hawker’s stall nearby and eat noodles while sitting on empty fruit crates. The child, Kyra, goes to watch a street juggler spin coloured balls.

A drunk staggers past singing a dirty song, the shredded remains of a soldier’s coat thrown over his shoulders and Jet lurches in anger before he sits back down again.

“It’s so strange to think the war is over,” Song says softly, watching the man stumble away.

Jet shoots her a look from the corner of his eye but she doesn’t seem to have any hidden intentions, no hidden agenda, no double meaning.

“Some people don’t know what to do with themselves. For so long all we’ve known has been violence and anger. Now that it’s over- what do we have left?”

“Is that what you think? That the anger goes away because one Fire Lord dies?” Jet asks her. He can’t stop the bitterness dredge up from the soles of his feet. “In case anyone has forgotten, there’s still another Fire Lord alive. The Fire Nation still exists. The murderers and thieves who killed our families and burned our villages get to go home to their wives and children, carrying gifts taken from the homes of our people.”

“But the new Fire Lord is...”

“Why should he be any different to the old one?” Jet interrupts, “How can we just forgive everything they’ve done in the past one hundred years?”

Song turns her face away and they sit in silence for a minute.

He thinks of Li, lifting not a finger to help him as he is led away by the Dai Li. The old man standing there protesting their innocence, lying through his teeth, and Zuko- with his face cold and hard as stone, allowing an innocent man to be arrested for knowing the truth.

Not that he is innocent. Jet thinks he may have lost his innocence at eight, hearing the screams of pain and death as his village was burned to the ground. He may have lost whatever was left when he first drove a knife into the back of a Fire Nation soldier. He certainly lost his sanity in Ba Sing Se, watching the light go around and around.

But he had been right. And Li had let him be arrested anyway.

“We have to go,” Song tells him, and stands up.

Jet lumbers to his feet and the cold noodles sit like rocks in his belly. He’s been hungry for so long that his stomach doesn’t know what to do with the food.

“Do you live near here?” he asks.

She smiles at him. “No. We live in a village outside Ba Sing Se.”

Jet leaves the city without looking back.

The village he finds himself in is small and half ruined. Roofs have holes and broken carts lie by the sides of houses with warped wooden walls.

People stare at him as the old vegetable seller drives them down the track that goes through the middle.

“Half the young men never came back,” Song whispers to him over Kyra’s drowsy head, “And those who came back are not whole.”

Jet stays a day and he sees what she means. The handful of soldiers who return are not happy men. They are not violent, nor are they uncaring, but they are haunted. Half of them carry scars. The other half carry guilt. They all carry pain.

Jet, who has his own scar and his own guilt and his own pain, feels like shaking them and screaming at them that this is not the way it ends. This is not what they fought for- this resignation and helpless ignorance of what normal life is.

Song’s mother does not like him. She regards him with suspicion and though she gives him a meal, she stands on the porch when he leaves and waits until he is out of sight.

Song looks an apology with her brown eyes but Jet shrugs. He is a suspicious person himself and he finds a place to stay with an old potter whose daughter died in the uniform of the Earth Kingdom.

The old man shapes the wet clay with his hands, making simple pots and utensils for eating. Jet watches him and thinks that after six months there must be earthbenders who have returned to this job, who could shape their pots without the worry and care that this old man takes.

He doesn’t think to leave the village for a year until a visitor arrives, and tells him of the Jasmine Dragon in Ba Sing Se.

Jet knows why it affects him. The uncle of the Fire Lord. The old man who put the final seal to his arrest, almost to his death, certainly to his imprisonment. The old man who is a firebender.

The old man, the visitor tells him, who helped to take back Ba Sing Se for the Earth Kingdom.

This, then, is where Jet feels the rage fan itself into flames. A life paid for a city is a decision he understands. But where he would have made that decision against a cadre of Fire Nation soldiers, scum who had infected his valley, his forest, his home, he was called a monster and a traitor. A firebender who committed the act merely to save his own skin is the hero.

Jet clenches his fists and leaves the inn, striding into the night because there is nothing more he would like than to lose his temper and his mind and simply let go of it all.

His madness seems to come in fits and bursts, with flashes of dark green foliage and the bright bold moon in the sky, the grit of clay caked beneath his fingernails and the phantom weight of his long-gone swords missing from his hands, from his belt. He has nothing to swing but a stick these days.

He thinks of Li, remembers the glare in those amber eyes, the straight back and lean, cold lines of his face. A refugee, he called himself, but even his worn clothes and the dirt on his hands had not hidden what he was.

And this, this is what Jet now is. He shapes mud to make a pot and he mends roofs and walls and broken carts. When he is allowed, he sits with a girl with calm brown eyes and tries to pretend that he is sane, that he is at peace, but his body remembers the fight, and his blades, and it remembers the bruises and cramps and hot, molten, searing pain of injury. He cannot enter a room without looking for the angle, the exits, the occupants. He cannot ask a question without issuing a challenge.

This is all he knows and he finds himself outside Song’s house in the middle of the night a year after he has met her, and as an honourable man he should wait until the morning. But Jet has never been honourable. He has been a fighter, not a warrior, and so he grasps the tree that is outside the house and climbs it, his body remembering the lithe flexibility it used to have, and he waits at the open window while his eyes adjust to the dark inside.

It’s not Song’s room; it’s her mother’s.

Jet grins to himself, vicious and desperate and past caring, and he goes in the window anyway. This is his challenge- he must move past the waiting dragon.

There is no art to this. The woman sleeps deeply, with dark smudges under her eyes and dead to the world. Jet slips out of the room and his heart is thundering. So loud he thinks it may wake the sleepers.

He finds Song easily enough. It’s a small house. He puts a hand over her mouth and she wakes with a fright, trying to sit up and get away, and he thinks that if he were Zuko, he would have simply held a flame in his hand to show her who was there.

But he has no fire, and has not thought to bring a candle or a lantern, so he whispers her name and his and tells her that he would never hurt her.

She takes him downstairs and out of the house, and they sit outside while the moon sinks towards the horizon and he does not tell her about Li. He tells her about the imprisonment, the Dai Li, the way they broke his mind and brainwashed him. He tells her how he almost died. He tells her that the man responsible is in Ba Sing Se and he must go and kill the man, but he asks, “Can I come back to you? When it’s over?”

He’s never had that. He’s never had to travel for his fight. The Fire Nation came to the Earth Kingdom, the soldiers came to the forest, Li came to Ba Sing Se.

She shakes her head. “Let it stay in the past, Jet,” she tells him, “The war is over. It’s over and you’re safe. You’re alive. Stay alive.”

Part of him thinks cynically that she must believe the man he talks about is young and dangerous. It rejoices that she doesn’t want him to die. This side shows itself in his smile, the way his lips curve and his eyes glint with self-confidence as they look down at her. Another part of him knows that Mushi- Iroh- is no useless old man. The Dragon of the West, the visitor said, the man who led the Masters of the three elements in the final siege of Ba Sing Se.

And Jet has not touched a blade for almost two years.

He dips his head and kisses her, and keeps his eyes open so he can watch hers slip closed. No man, he thinks, could possibly do anything else when sitting beside a woman like her.

She doesn’t push him away but she retreats from him, head down, face turned away, and Jet lets her go and watches as she lifts her leg and slowly lifts the hem of her robe.

The sight of the scar steals his breath away and for a moment he cannot think, cannot talk. His mind is a traitor and flashes a glint of fire golden eyes and the scar that can never be hidden, never be mistaken.

“We’ve all been hurt,” she tells him, “But the past cannot be changed. The scars will stay, no matter what you do.” And then, because he has kissed her, “I know it’s not pretty to look at.”

She pulls her dress down but he stops her. It’s not honourable, but he has never been honourable. Honour is for nobility and royalty and even they are never honourable when they have been dragged to his level on the streets of Ba Sing Se. He reaches down, and he touches the tips of his fingers to the splotchy skin, the uneven surface cool and smooth and soft.  
She does not push his hand away. But he sees her eyes look inward to something he cannot see, and then she just looks sad and tired and defeated.

In the year he has known her, Jet has never seen his Song look defeated. So he pulls his hand away and he says, “I’d kill him for you, the guy who did this.”

And she smiles, even more tiredly, and says, “And I’d stop you from doing it, if I could.”

“Fire destroys.”

“Fire warms.”

And it is ridiculous, that they are Earth Kingdom and non-benders, and yet they talk about the nature of fire while the sun comes up.

Jet leaves when the first rays pierce the cool blue early morning light, and as he goes, he feels her eyes follow him. There is something watchful in her gaze that he doesn’t understand but he shrugs it off.

He ignores the grumbling from his old man and curls up in a corner of the inner room, wrapping his blanket around himself as he sleeps through the day. He dreams of flames and moons and green trees, of swinging high above the ground and giving his life to protect someone, anyone.

When he wakes up, he goes to Song’s house. He bows to her mother and pays her respect. He speaks to her as calmly as he can while the white spots dance on the edges of his vision. The rage is kept hidden, locked firmly while he tries to show himself as worthy of the daughter of the house.

“She’s too young,” Song’s mother tells him.

“I can wait,” he says, and he tries to turn his smile from something cocky and self-assured to something genuine.

Song comes home from the clinic when he is still there and Jet turns his head to look at her. From the look on his face she guesses. And she stays composed, though she flushes as her eyes flick to her mother.

“Come back tomorrow,” she tells him firmly, and steers him out of the house.

He loves her for it, this firm dependability, her sanity, her calm. He loves her for the way she is peace and serenity, and for the way she has suffered. There is no conflict, no hunger in her eyes. She stands with her back straight and her head up as if she can shoulder the burdens of the world.

He goes back the next day and she herself says she is too young.

“I told your mother I’d wait,” Jet says, and this time he allows himself a smirk.

Song smiles up at him, and doesn’t move back. Nor does she move forward. But she also looks worried. “We’re... very different,” she says slowly, “I don’t know if I am the person you want.”

“What does that mean?”

She doesn’t answer him, and she looks as if she is embarrassed to explain it in words, so he leans down and kisses her.

“I want you,” he whispers, “I can make your happy.”

Her eyes slip closed again and he watches her face, her skin that is not perfect but is fair and soft, her hair that is brown and short. He has his hands on her waist and so he knows that she is no slender, delicate flower.

There is gossip that reaches even villages like this one; the Fire Lord came to Ba Sing Se after the war. He brought his betrothed to meet his uncle, a woman of his own nation. Jet has seen no images of the kind of the woman who can catch the Fire Lord’s eye, but he has heard the description- tall, dark haired, fair skinned, slender. The Fire Lord came to Ba Sing Se, when Jet was still in prison, and his betrothed stood beside him.

There is other gossip. One rumour says the woman is also a firebender. Another rumour says that the woman is a swordsman. More than four rumours say she can use a weapon of some kind.

Song cannot use a weapon, but Jet does not care. There is no need for weapons when the war is over.


	2. The End of Hostilities

In the end she makes him wait for one more year.  
They’re still both young when they get married, though Jet feels... no. He doesn’t feel old, but he feels alive. He feels as if he knows what the world is and what he can expect from it. He marries Song with a return to his old arrogance. He loves her, and he craves her, but she is also his due.   
He has talked himself into believing that she is his payment for all his suffering.   
It’s a selfish view, one she points out to him plainly not three months into their marriage.   
He leaves for three days and when he returns she is there, cooking. Their hut is still standing. She is back to her calm and serenity and for the first time since he has known her, he wants to break that mask. He wants her to scream and shout, to cry, to say things that are not always so carefully phrased. He wants to see her fall, trip over something, break something. He wants her helpless and hopeless and clinging to him.  
The rage of it shakes through his fists and he has to pause in the doorway until it ebbs.  
She knows he’s there; she said hello when he entered.   
By the time he has control enough to walk inside, she has sat down. And she waits there, meekly, while he crosses the floor towards her and then drops to the matting.  
“I’m sorry if I said anything to hurt you,” she says.  
It makes his chest tighten a little more, because she was right. Jet takes the opportunity to hold his tongue and keep his anger.  
The rest of the evening is silence, and when the meal is finished, he leaves again. He sits outside and drags his fingertips back and forth against the doorframe.   
He begins with anger. By the time she comes to the door to say a quiet goodnight, he is watching for her, eyes soft and hands gentle. He stands up when he sees her, at least to show that she is important enough for him to approach her. He stands a hand span away from her and then he drops to his knees in silent supplication.  
It’s possibly the first and only truly dramatic fight that they have.   
Ironically, he tries to make it up to her with careful kisses and humble tenderness but she grips the back of his head with strength that he has never felt her use before. She buries her face in the crook of his neck and her skin is so hot that he shivers.  
“Harder,” she whispers, and he actually grins in the dark and dares to bite down on her shoulder.  
The next morning she is a little awkward and withdrawn and when he tries to tease her out of it, she holds her breath for a long moment and then looks him firmly in the eye.  
“I let you do in private what I don’t want you to do in public,” she says, “I’m not a prize. No one sees me as a prize. Don’t treat me like one.”  
He looks at her oddly. “How do you not see yourself as the rest of us do?”  
She doesn’t bring it up again for another two years.  
When she is twenty, she gives him a daughter. When she is twenty-one, she gives him a son. When she is twenty-four, she miscarries, but when she is twenty-five, they welcome another son into their family.  
Jet copes as best he can. Their family is large and the going is hard, now that there are five to provide for and Song cannot work the hours she used to. There are nights and days and weeks when he feels the panic of living from day to day.  
When that happens, he picks up a knife, or he glances to his cloak, and he thinks that it would be so easy to simply fade into the shadows for a night or two. No one need ask about the spoils of war. He tells himself that it would be an option were things to go bad. He tells himself that if he did steal, it would only be to survive.   
He has been told that his moral centre is kind of badly out of focus. No less a person than the Avatar and his waterbending Master of a mate have pointed this out to him.  
At twenty-five, nine years after his last meeting with them, Jet still hears the odd rumour. He hears that Aang travels through all the nations, stopping most frequently at the small towns and villages, hoping to hear their problems and help if he can.  
So far, Jet has been in this village for eight years but Aang has not been seen in the area.  
He hears that Katara travels with Aang. He hears that they have helped to put down post-war rebellions in the Earth Kingdom and the Fire Nation.  
He hears that the Fire Lord himself is a close friend to the Avatar.   
He hears fewer rumours about that than before. The world turns and with the end of the war the Earth Kingdom just wants to forget about the Fire Nation. Still, some news gets through. Jet hears that the Fire Lord has taken a wife, with all the pomp and splendour that was due the occasion. He hears it over a year after the fact so it is old news and no one wants to think about details.  
He tries to image Li as he would be at twenty-five. Taller? Maybe. They had been seventeen on the ferry to Ba Sing Se. Almost children. He looks at his oldest daughter and she is almost five. Only twelve years younger than he was when he saw that pair of golden fire eyes and almost died as a result.  
There are nights when he still dreams of flames and bold, bright moons. He still dreams of green trees and hook swords and fighting. Song says that he twitches in his sleep some nights. She laughs softly when she says this and her eyes slide down, and he knows she is thinking of the exact muscle and how it moves beneath the skin. Age has put a little more weight on her, and taken some of her colour. She is tired more, these days, but she seems happy.  
Jet thinks about sitting beside her in silence in an empty house listening to her apologise for what was not her fault, and he cannot believe that five years have moved them to this noise and endless energy. Three energetic children and there is so much needed of them, there is so much happening.  
He copes as best he can but there are bad times. They try to keep it from the children and he tries to keep it from her but she always knows.   
Jet can lie but she looks at him steadily and he feels ashamed. She is his strength, his guidance, and when he tells her that, she flushes and says bitterly that she is not as strong as he thinks. He asks her what makes her stay with him and she looks surprised, as if he should already know. As if this is obvious.   
Since it isn’t, he smirks and moves closer and teases her by asking again, voice low and rough.  
“You’ll laugh at me,” she warns.  
He waits.  
“You make everything an adventure.”  
He doesn’t laugh, exactly.   
When she is twenty-six, she falls ill. Medicine is expensive and he has three hungry little mouths to feed. Song’s mother comes to help but with the sudden disruption to his family life, Jet feels some of the panic sear through his brain, hot and molten and rising into rage.  
He doesn’t know what to do.  
Song grows worse. She is weak. She tries to help but he shouts at her to get back to her bed and stay there. He puts her there forcibly and watches her mother compress her lips and draw the children’s attention away from them.  
He goes out to walk off his helpless temper and in the end, it is this that saves them. He has no hook swords, no knife, no weapons, but his body remembers how to fight and he still walks with an eye to the angles, so when he spots trouble in a bush, his anger leads him to intervene.  
The coach that would have been robbed is stopped. The owner is a palace official and Jet has neatly and efficiently brought down the highway man that was lying in wait.   
It takes some weeks to filter through the correct channels but he is asked if he would be interested in drawing a wage from the governor of the area.   
“Why?” he asks.  
“You can fight and you’re intelligent. We need someone to keep order.”  
Jet had no notion that the area was such a hotbed of crime but he shrugs his shoulders and accepts. It’s a steady job. A thought also occurs to him that does not occur to the governor- he can make sure that justice is done.  
Not the law. But justice. There is a difference.   
Jet has been told that his moral centre is bad but Song is getting better, and Jet thinks bitterly that he at least understands what can drive a man to blow up a dam.  
Song is moving more freely when he tells her the news. Her mother compresses her lips and says nothing.  
“Your mother hates me,” Jet remarks.  
And Song winces. “It’s not you. It’s just... you remind her of someone.”  
“Someone she didn’t like, I take it.”  
“No, she did,” Song tells him, “That was the problem. He was a confused boy. We were kind to him but he stole from us. I know why he did, but... it wasn’t nice.”  
“Some people just can’t be trusted,” Jet says, and he tries to understand things from his mother-in-law’s point of view.  
It’s a good life, either way. They have enough money and a roof over their heads. The children are healthy and fed and happy. Song gets better as the months go by. Her cough vanishes for whole weeks at a time.  
Three years pass and Jet thinks that this finally will be his chance at peace. His job is neither dangerous nor difficult. For the most part, he is barely required at all. But there are moments- chasing down an escaped prisoner leaves Jet with a slash on his thigh, a broken wrist, and his heart pumping, and the adrenaline of the fight takes him back to when he was young and wanted to save the world.  
His daughter is almost nine when she comes back home from school with the news that an important man in Ba Sing Se died.  
Jet feels the hairs on the back of his neck prickle.   
Song looks up sharply when she notices the change in the air.   
“Do you know his name?” Jet asks.  
His little girl shakes her brown head and blinks at him with his own dark eyes. “Someone said he was a dragon,” she says, “Do they have dragons in Ba Sing Se?”  
“No,” Song answers for him, because he is no longer in the house with its noise and its energy, but is back on the streets outside a teashop in the lower levels, while an old man says, “You are confused.”  
There is only one Dragon that Jet can think of, and that is the Dragon of the West, the firebender who served tea and played pai sho and led the Masters of three elements when they liberated the great City from the Fire Nation.  
If Mushi is dead, then Li will come to mourn.  
Jet does not leave the house that evening but his brain moves feverishly through his thoughts, jumping from one limb to the next without rhyme or reason. He knows the urge to hate, to understand, the pull of the mystery- ‘why’, ‘who’, ‘what’. He can see Mushi in his mind’s eye through an open window, talking pleasantly to a sulky boy who does not answer, refuses to answer, because his pride is hurt by how far he has fallen.  
It takes Jet thirteen years to see Li as anything but a boy, not a warrior. Probably just confused, suspicious, humiliated, and hurt. Son of the Fire Lord passing himself off an Earth Kingdom refugee. Jet would laugh but there is no humour since he has paid the price for Li’s pride.  
Thirteen years later, Jet knows that he was a fool to go in there with his swords drawn, hoping to push Li- Zuko- into firebending. Thirteen years later, he also knows that Li seized the opportunity for a fight that had never needed to happen. These days Jet would know how to diffuse such a situation.  
He hopes the Fire Lord has learned how to diffuse difficult situations too otherwise the diplomatic life of the Fire Nation would be in torment. Not that he cares, but it amuses him.  
It amuses him in a way to think of Li in long red robes, trying to make decisions on agriculture and trade, on taxes, when the boy he remembers didn’t seem to understand half the things that normal people did. Had no clue about some of the items for sale in the markets, had no idea how to speak to someone who wasn’t a servant or a warrior.  
Song wraps her arms around him that night and lays her forehead against his. They breathe together, and Jet rubs his long fingers up the scarred skin of her leg while he closes his eyes and pretends that he is fine, this is fine.   
The rage and the betrayal howl in him and he hates himself for never making the trip to Ba Sing Se. He hates that he did not look the old man in the eye. He hates that Iroh never knew the consequences of his lies.  
In the end, it doesn’t matter. In the end, the fates conspire against them. In the end, he receives word from the governor that an envoy of Earth Kingdom high guards will be passing through the area and he is to keep an eye out in the days before and after to make sure that they receive safe passage.  
Jet hears no murmurs of anything important and there are no strangers in the area, so he is surprised when his oldest son comes careening through the door of the workshop where he is helping a neighbour mend a table.  
“What’s wrong?” he asks immediately, and scoops his son up to make sure that he is alright and alive and safe.  
“There’s someone in our house,” his son tells him.  
The war has been over for thirteen years, but Jet’s heart stops at the words that echo right back to his childhood. He puts his son down, tells him to stay there, and then he is running. He isn’t sixteen any more, but Song is home with their youngest child and he has no weapons except the rough knife he was holding to par the soft wood.  
He bursts into his house and the first thing he sees is his wife. She is sitting with her back straight, her head up, and she is pale. His heart is twisting in panic and the loss of breath that comes quicker with passing years when he sees the visitor sitting beside her.  
His heart stops altogether.  
It is a vision in rich red robes, dark hair worn long and flowing, a simple flame crest tucked into the topknot. Fire golden eyes narrow at his dramatic entrance and then one good eye widens to almost comic roundness, the other ringed with the scar tissue from a terrible burn.  
Li- Zuko- sweeps to his feet in a rush of fabric and confusion and demands, “What is going on?” as if this is some joke that is being played at his expense.  
Fire Lord Zuko. Former banished Prince Zuko, son of Ozai, grandson of Azulon, great-grandson of Sozin, descendant of Agni.   
“It’s alright, sir, this is my husband. Jet, please, I’m alright.”  
He almost falls to his knees as his mind roils in confusion.  
“My son?” he gasps, because he cannot believe that this is happening, and his children are all the world to him.   
“He is outside, playing with his friends,” Song tells him.  
She stands as well, looking worried, and she comes to him.  
Jet holds his breath and waits for Zuko to stop her, to snatch her up- why, he can’t say- but when she reaches his side with her hand out, he seizes his opportunity to push her behind him and place himself between her and the Fire Lord.  
Zuko steps forward when Song lets out a cry, but halts when Jet’s hand comes up the knife.  
“Jet,” he says, and his voice has the same hoarse gravel in it, though it is deeper than Jet remembers, “I’m not here to fight.”  
It makes no difference that Zuko has no swords this time. He is a firebender, he is not in disguise, and he is in Jet’s house which is made of wood. Given that he is the Fire Lord, Jet wants to know where the bodyguards are.  
“Why are you here?” Jet asks.  
He keeps his voice low and steady, eyes trained on Zuko’s face with the intensity that is meant to warn the man that he will attack if need be, will protect what is his own.  
“I came to see Song,” is the answer he gets.  
She presses against his side and says fearfully, “Jet. Jet, please, he’s not doing any harm.”  
“Listen to reason,” Zuko says bluntly, “And why would I come here to attack you?”  
“Why would you come to see Song?”  
The Fire Lord darts his eyes to the woman beside Jet, flushes, and then drop his gaze. For a moment he looks seventeen again, with his clean-shaven face and the fine lines of his features. For only a moment, but Jet does not forget that this man was dangerous at seventeen, as a dispossessed Prince, and would be far more dangerous now as a Fire Lord at thirty.   
“He was the boy who stole from us,” Song tells him softly, “Remember? I told you that we were kind to a boy and his uncle. We let them in and gave him food, drink, rations for their journey. The boy was... strange. He didn’t act like other people.”  
Jet lowers the knife a little. Zuko’s chin has come up, and he looks Jet in the eye, grimly and proudly, just as he had on the ferry. With the clear warning not to get too close. Don’t touch. Don’t stare. Don’t want.  
Song reaches out and puts her cool fingers on Jet’s wrist, gently pressing down until the hand with the knife is by their side. “When they left, the boy crept back to the house, and he stole our ostrich horse.”  
Jet isn’t sure what to think of this. It’s almost ridiculous. The thought of the Fire Lord once stealing an ostrich horse is bad enough, but the thought of Li meeting Song on his journeys is even more confusing.   
“I was introduced to the governor of this area in Ba Sing Se,” Zuko tells him, “I was telling him about the kindness of Earth Nation people. Without mentioning the ostrich horse,” he adds hastily, a look of discomfort tightening his jaw, briefly, “I told him about Song. He mentioned that there was a Song in his province, who worked in a clinic and who had come from another village during the war.”  
This time Zuko’s eyes flick to Song. “I wanted to see if it is was the girl I remembered. And I wanted to ask forgiveness for what I did.”  
“I understood why you did it,” she says.  
Jet hears something in her voice, a soft regret, a small sliver of something wistful. And his blood boils.  
He growls, soft and feral, and he drops the knife. “Get out of my house,” he says.  
Zuko looks taken aback.  
Song gasps.   
Jet doesn’t care about their reactions. After so many years and so much emotion, he doesn’t want Li standing in this place of peace and serenity. He doesn’t want Li to have any part of his wife’s past or her heart. He doesn’t want the agony of wonder and frustration and bitter envy. For one, or for both, at this point in his life he cannot say. He will not say.  
“Get out,” he shouts.  
He isn’t surprised at the time, but Zuko takes a deep breath and then dips his head. “Very well. I’ve already spoken to Song.”  
Jet’s hands don’t shake, but he can barely hear the sentence of polite leave-taking that Zuko offers before moving towards them. Jet stands his ground. He doesn’t realise that he has balanced his weight on the balls of his feet in expectation of an attack until Zuko draws level, the burn scar a vivid red against his pale skin and dark hair, and then he moves past. Gone.   
Jet shifts his weight back to normal and turns around to face Song.  
Her face is stone. He has never seen her look like that.  
“Wait here,” she tells him, and walks to the door after Zuko.  
He respects her enough not to treat her the way he would have treated her when they were nineteen and young, and when he was arrogant and thought she was his due. Instead he watches her as she hurries to Zuko, watches the Fire Lord bend his head, taller than he remembers, and he watches Zuko look up and look around at him.  
Zuko nods once, and comes back to the house.   
But he doesn’t come inside. With a look at Song, and then with a blank, somewhat surprisingly ironic look at Jet, he sits down on the bare porch in his fine clothes and settles in to wait patiently.  
Jet doesn’t know if he is going insane or if he is dreaming.   
Song comes in and closes the door behind her. “Please tell me what’s wrong,” she says softly, “How do you know the Fire Lord? Why does this upset you?”  
For answer, Jet pulls up his shirt and shows her the thick, white scar across his belly. He has filled out a little, and his skin is darkly sun-browned again, but there is no disguising the scar when it is in plain sight, no more than Zuko could ever disguise his.  
“He is the cause of this,” he hisses, “Him and his uncle.” He drops his shirt. She has seen the scar before. “They were travelling as Earth Kingdom refugees on the ferry to Ba Sing Se when we met. He helped me steal food from the galley for the other passengers. It seems the Fire Lord has a history of thieving.” He glares at the door over Song’s shoulder but it is shut. “I wanted him to join my freedom fighters.”  
She knows about the freedom fighters. She knows about the valley that Jet flooded. He told her, holding onto his head in the year before they got married, warning her that she would be tied to someone who feels as if he were going mad some days. She had stroked his hair and kissed his neck, and never once had she ever thrown the knowledge back in his face.  
Jet loves her and hates Zuko and he takes a step forward and curls his fingers tight around her arms. “I saw the old man firebend! He complained about the tea being cold so how could it be warm enough to steam unless he firebent?”  
He shakes her a little and then lets go with a small shove, and the agitation of thirteen years is streaming through his blood all over again.  
“I tried to prove it. I told my friends. No one would listen to me. I waited and I watched and then I knew I would have to force them to reveal themselves. I attacked Li in the teashop.”  
Song looks tired and defeated as the words pour out.   
“Even then he wouldn’t firebend. He took a pair of dual swords and fought back. When the Dai Li came to see what was going on, he let them arrest me. I was right but he let them take me away. Do you know what they did to me then? I told you. Do you remember? They messed with my mind.” He reaches up to grip tightly at his own hair. “I almost died under Lake Laogi and my friends were arrested. I don’t know if they’re even alive. I spent eleven months in prison. I was beaten. I was starved. All because I was telling the truth and because he would not save me.”  
He thinks that this is where the door should slide open, where Zuko should come in having heard everything and wanting to put it right, but nothing happens. Song shakes her head at him.  
“Jet, he probably didn’t know what would happen when you were arrested. He probably thought they’d keep you for a few days and then let you go.”  
“He let me go to prison. He was a coward!”  
“It was a mistake he made in a bad situation. You fought him, Jet. You attacked him. What did you think he’d do?”  
“I was right about him. He should have known that and had some...”  
Song looks up at him, as if she has seen it all before, the best and the worst of people, and she says, “Understanding. You thought he would understand.”  
“Yes.”  
“You could tell him this. Tell him that he is to blame. This was why you wanted to go to Ba Sing Se? To meet his uncle so you could say this? His uncle has just died a month ago. The Fire Lord is here to mourn him, and to settle his uncle’s affairs. In doing so he has come to acknowledge a wrong he committed in the past. Let him know this is another. Give him the chance to make amends.”  
“Why should I?”  
“Because,” she tells him, “The anger is burning you. Not him. Give him your pain and make him responsible for it instead.”  
The word ‘burning’ is what settles it for him. Jet glares at the door again but he holds Song, breathes in the smell of her hair and soaks in the warmth of her body, and then he detaches himself and strides out onto the porch.  
Zuko is still sitting there, not a hair out of place. He seems to be contemplating the scenery.   
Jet sits down slowly beside him. It’s only after he takes a seat that he realises he is sitting to Zuko’s scarred left. Given that Zuko turns his head slightly to watch him, he wonders if there is any loss of vision in that eye. He thinks not; it seems as sharp and clear as the other, though the eyelids are burned and slitted.  
“I thought you died,” Zuko begins, “Under Lake Laogi. There was a play...” He stops and coughs, sounding embarrassed. “It doesn’t matter.”  
“I almost did die,” Jet says simply.  
“The others told me about Long Feng.”  
“The others?”  
“Aang, Katara, Sokka, Toph,” Zuko lists, “They said you were badly injured by Long Feng. They all think you’re dead.”  
“You sound almost disappointed, Fire Lord.” He gives the title the full disgust it deserves. And then, when the venom is still dripping out of those words, he leans back on his hands and smirks with no humour right at the eye watching him from the corner of scarred, reddened eyelid. “So tell me, Li- did they also tell you what happened when I got arrested by the Dai Li?”  
He remembers Zuko’s hair being short, spikey and prickly and with drops of sea water from leaning over the edge of the boat to watch the waves in boredom. He remembers it growing out a little more in Ba Sing Se. But he has never pictured it in this almost effeminate style, long enough to hang down Zuko’s straight back, drawn away carefully from his face and looking as smooth as silk.  
The hair moves like a curtain as Zuko shifts position. He turns himself so that he can look at Jet with both eyes, but Jet stays as he is, leaning back on his hands and letting black humour twist up the corners of his mouth. He lets the tension sit there, fizzing, feeding into Zuko’s awkwardness.  
“My name is not Li,” Zuko acknowledges, “You must know that by now. Song knew me as Li, too.”  
“Stealing an ostrich horse. You made quite the habit of stealing.”  
“I was trying to stay alive.”  
“I am in charge of law and justice in this area. Do you know how many times people say that to me?”  
“You stole with me on the ferry.”  
“I was a street kid,” Jet says smugly, “I knew no better. Fire Nation killed my parents when I was eight. If I didn’t get by with stealing and begging, I’d have nothing.”  
Zuko looks at his hands. “When I met you, my sister was trying to kill me. My father wanted me dead as a disgrace to our family. My face was on wanted posters all across the colonies. And,” he points to his scar, “I was recognisable. I could not work for a living. I had no skill I could trade. I had no money, no treasures, nothing but the shirt on my back. An Earth Kingdom village did find out who I was once. I faced down a group of bullies who were terrorising them but they still didn’t want to know.”  
“Can you blame them? If the Fire Nation hadn’t started the war, there would have been no problem. No soldiers terrorising people. No burned villages and orphans and...”  
“But I never did those things!” For the first time that day, Zuko’s voice rises, and with it comes the frustration, the sudden fire that sets Jet’s skin tingling.  
“Of course not,” Jet mocks, “You’d have just ordered someone else to do it for you. Kill all the Earth Kingdom peasants and never mind their brats.”  
“I never killed your parents. All I wanted to do was live where no one was trying to kill me.”  
Jet slides up his shirt again, and arches his back. “You see this?” He lets one lazy forefinger trace the car. Zuko’s golden eyes follow the movement. Jet lets the heat flow, slow and intoxicating and thick as syrup. “This is where they cut me open to drain the blood. The reason I got it was because I tried to help the Avatar against Long Feng. The reason I did that was because Long Feng had me brainwashed. The reason he got his hands on me at all was because you let them arrest me.” He waits for a minute and then slips in, “You and your uncle.”  
The pain is so immediate and so strong that he can almost taste it. Zuko’s face is a study in longing and sadness for the loss of a loved one.  
“My uncle was not to blame,” he insists, “I could have said something. I didn’t.”  
“Your uncle kept saying I was confused, I was wrong. You said nothing. He said everything. He’s the reason I was taken.”  
“It was my fault.”  
Jet is enjoying this. He is enjoying the sight of Zuko’s desire to confess, accept blame, be humble, out of respect for the memory of his uncle.  
“But,” the golden eyes blaze slightly, “You attacked us. Can you imagine what would have happened if someone had caught us? My uncle and I would have been captured, tortured.”  
“You mean you would have been thrown into a prison, brainwashed, beaten, starved? Is that torture?”  
“I’m sorry.”  
“Say it again.”  
The Fire Lord looks up sharply. “I’m sorry for what you went through.”  
“Again.”  
“Jet.”  
“If you want to earn my forgiveness, you’ll say it again. If you don’t, well, that’s not my problem.”  
Zuko swallows. “I’m sorry.”  
Jet lets his mouth curl up at the corners. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”  
But now Zuko is looking at him, brows drawn together and eyes fierce with concentration. “No, but you still don’t forgive.”  
Jet shrugs.   
“Maybe there is nothing to forgive, Jet. You tried to have to have us captured. Your plan didn’t work. We could leave it there. Leave the past behind.” Zuko gently lifts a hand to indicate their surroundings. “You have a good life.”  
Jet looks at the wooden porch beneath him.   
“You look happy,” Zuko tells him.  
There is something awkwardly prompting in the words. Jet can almost believe that Zuko is trying to make conversation. Which is absurd.  
So he looks up and says, “And you? I heard you were married. Is your Fire Lady to your satisfaction?”  
“She was.” Something flickers on Zuko’s face. Another flash of sadness. “She died last year.”  
The silence stretches and if it had been anyone else, Jet would have tried to understand, would have offered his sympathy, but this is Li- Zuko- and there is no sympathy that he feels he can spare.  
“Is that why you came here? Thought you’d have a little fun with an Earth Kingdom girl?”  
Zuko’s mouth twists with disgust. “No,” he says harshly, and his jaw tenses. He calms himself with a visible effort. “Song...” he looks at the door to the house, “... she was the first person to be kind to me during a hard time in my life. Apart from my uncle. He liked her. He never wanted me to steal from her and her mother. I wanted to come for him as much as myself. I never expected to find you here too. How did you even meet?”  
“In Ba Sing Se,” Jet says shortly.  
Zuko dips his head a little in thought. “Did you follow her here?”  
“Why do you say that?”  
“Because this is not Ba Sing Se.”  
Something in Zuko’s voice is strange, light almost, as if he finds it funny to answer such a question, and it makes Jet narrow his eyes because Li had all the sense of humour of a komodo rhino.  
“Does it matter if I did?”  
“No. I was just asking.” He looks around again. “And you have children.”  
Jet realises that of all the rumours he’s heard and not heard, children have never figured in the Fire Lord’s news. “Do you?”  
Zuko softens. “Two. Two boys.”  
“Firebenders?”  
The “yes” comes out in resigned and weary terms.  
“Pity,” Jet says, teeth clicking shut, and wishes he had a blade of wheat to lend the attitude a bit more dash.  
But he is older now, and hopefully wiser, and the day of stress has made him tired. He contemplates Zuko as he is and tries to see the harsh, brutal, vulnerable traces of Li but those have faded.  
“I should go,” Zuko says, and begins to get up.  
Jet suddenly wants to see him out of those robes. They make him look bulky and solid but there is a hint there, as Zuko rises lithely to his feet, that the lean, trained lines of his body are still very much the same.   
Jet remembers the sight one night, when they were both seventeen, of watching Li alone in his apartment through the window slide a hand down his chest, quiet and silent and oh so slowly. He remembers watching that hand disappear into loosened pants, working and twisting and touching under stealthy cover of cloth, and the way Li’s body had arched, the way he had writhed, the way his hips had snapped up once, twice, three times before his body turned lax and fluid. Too far to hear it, but Jet had always imagined that Li would gasp and moan, would be noisy, somehow.  
The way that Song was when it was just them in the house. The way, Jet thinks, a lot of people are when they seem as though they cannot be touched, cannot be moved. They don’t feel less, but more. And one touch could be all it ever takes.  
He thinks of Song lifting her hand when they first met, not to touch but just to draw his attention. And he thinks of the brush of her hand as they left Ba Sing Se together, the warmth sending a relief through his blood that hadn’t been easy to understand at the time.   
He rises to his feet, trying to do it as gracefully as he used to, as Zuko still does, and Zuko reaches out gently with his hand and touches his shoulder.  
“You look the same. And I’m glad you’re still alive,” Zuko- Li- tells him.  
And then he leaves.  
Jet watches while a Fire Nation soldier steps out from the shadow of some trees. He wonders how he never saw the soldier when he was running towards the house.  
But then, he has stopped looking for Fire Nation soldiers. He has stopped watching for firebenders. The war has been over for thirteen years so far and when Jet finally turns around and enters his own home, he feels as if reparation has finally been made.


End file.
